"Baseball is cool again," said a New York baseball writer, referring to Mark McGwire's 1998 efforts to break Roger Maris' single-season home run record.

Christine Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, was called "a cool mom."

I recall when "cool" was an air-conditioned movie or car and Miles Davis personified the "cool school" of jazz. Or as Marlon Brando famously mumbled in 1954's classic motorcycle gang flick "The Wild One," "If you want to stay cool, you got to whale."

Now on to some of those, like, amazing references so many people in the public eye amazingly, like, overuse. You know, such as "amazing" and "like."

The online Free Dictionary's definition of "amazing" is: "To affect with great wonder; astonish; to cause great wonder or astonishment." So that must be why all these people call a mundane act, event or someone's physical appearance "amazing."

I do get chills hearing stirring versions of "Amazing Grace," such as the bagpipes near the end of 1976's fine remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," but I gag when "amazing" is thrown around willy-nilly. No matter how you cut it, skinny, flat-ass, white female movie stars with no hips are not "amazing." But that's how many are described.

Finally, what's up with preceding every other phrase with "like"? I always thought the word meant something that is similar. You know, such as: "Her face looked like 40 miles of bad road." But no, now we've got nonsense such as the following recounting of a street crime I recently heard in a TV news interview of a young white woman:

"I was, like, looking over my shoulder and, like, I saw this guy running. And then, like, he was, like, jumping over a fence and, like, he turned and, like, pointed a gun at me. I was, like, are you kidding me?"

At the end of the day, I've got to ask, like, what the hell is, like, going on here? I mean, like, how cool can it be to keep saying "like" and calling everything under the sun "cool" and "amazing"? Like, please tell me? And, like, that's the name of that tune. It's, like, cool and amazing, isn't it?